Hard Drive Water Damage

"Hard drive water damage," is not an uncommon call. It's associated with natural disasters, burst pipes and office fire systems. Whatever the specific cause, it's worth noting that water damaged hard drives are encountered regularly.

The recovery of data from water damaged disks is invariably of critical importance to the owner. If the data was backed up, it's almost certain that the backup copies were kept at the same location. They were also victims of hard drive water damage.

The first thing that needs to be understood is that recovering data from a water damaged hard drive is possible, but only by specialists. It should not be attempted by anyone except a qualified person armed with all the necessary equipment and facilities.

Second, turn off power to the drive. Under no circumstances attempt to use the disk drive or laptop.

Third, water damaged drives should be handled with extreme care and no attempt should be made to dry them out. In fact, keep them wet or at least damp by putting them in a sealed plastic bag with a moist sponge. Drives must to be kept moist or damp so as to reduce the possibility of sediment hardening or scaling on the surface of platter(s).

Finally, pack the drives with extreme care for the trip to meet a specialist. If the water damage was the consequence of a natural disaster, it's probable that your local specialists will be "inundated" with work for some time. You may need to ship the drive interstate in order to receive prompt attention.

As is often the case with laptop security threats the most reliable solution is to regularly backup and store copies in a secure remote location.

It maybe comforting to also know that it's actually quite difficult to completely destroy data on a hard drive. Some extreme measures have to be taken to guarantee that data cannot be recovered. To illustrate this point, see what is involved in data recovery protection.